CHAPTER XXII

THE AFTERGLOW

While Jimmie was hastening over across the sun-sodden fields in search of a nurse, Captain James Dadd returned to the cottage and stood by the cot of his son, looking down at him again.

Private Joseph Brinton stared back, trying to make sure that his father, the wastrel, really wore the insignia of an army captain.

Trying to make sure--not to understand. That was beyond him.

“Jimmie’s doing some real brave work, isn’t he?” said the father timidly.

“Why, he’s--Father, I wish you’d tell me how you--”

“Jimmie’s well thought of by everyone--officers and men,” Dad continued hastily, feeling suddenly guilty the moment the conversation turned to his own unworthy self. “I’m glad you have such a son, Joseph. Maybe he’ll make it up to you for my having wasted so much of my life. Because, you see, I do know, I do understand, that your own life has always been founded on big principles. And I guess there has always been something careless about--”

“Stop!” ordered Private Joseph Brinton dazedly; and Captain James Dadd meekly obeyed.

“Stop! As far as I can see, father, you must have done some wonderful work as a soldier--however it all came about--and--”

He paused, blinked, and caught up the thread of his words:

“But honestly, father--and I think you understand that I am not a man who has been accustomed to be apologetic--I really feel that I have learned something during the past year of fighting for the old flag. Somehow, honestly, father--though perhaps you won’t believe it--”

Joseph stopped, almost shy, while his father hastened to assure him.

“Oh, yes, yes! I do believe you, Joseph.”

“Well, father, sometimes nights, when I’ve sat by a camp-fire or paced a lonely post doing sentry-go, I’ve wondered if my business was necessarily as important as I used to think it was; and I wondered if I didn’t make the mistake of thinking that Almighty God created the world just for that business of mine; and if I wasn’t rather harsh with you.”

“Joe!” exclaimed Dad in wonder; but his son plunged on:

“And now when I’ve found how dev’lishly hard--yes, dev’lish, though you know I never did believe in cussing--how dev’lishly hard it was just to be a private, and forget your own cold feet and stinging eyes when you were ordered out in the night to trot down in front--ugh!--down there in the darkness where little flashes showed the enemy were waiting for you--when I found out how hard that was, and now I find _you_ here an officer--and you so much older than I--_oh_!”

His voice rose almost to a shriek.

“Those flashes--us sitting by the fire, thinking of home and the office, and feeling so safe, and then having to shoulder Springfields and trot down there where there might be a Reb behind every tree--father, I swear to you that often--_often_--it was because I remembered that I was the son of a soldier that I was able to do it.

“Business had killed something in me, but war seems to have brought it to life again, and I’m proud of you--proud--oh, Daddy--oh, I’ve wanted to tell you--”

He choked. The wound and the shock were doing their work on self-contained Joseph Brinton.

Captain James Dadd, falling on his knees beside the rude and cluttered cot, smoothed his son’s hair. He darted out to the spring at the back of the cottage and brought his cap full of water, and bathed Joseph’s forehead, all the while agitatedly insisting:

“There, there, my boy! You were right--I wasn’t much good, and if you did think of me as a soldier, it’s more than I deserved. Don’t--don’t, my boy! I don’t at all understand what you mean about business having killed something in you. You were always an upright man.”

“I--”

“I’ve always been proud of you--I’ve always prayed that the dear God would forgive me for my own useless life because my son was a man who helped build up progress and helped keep his world going. And you were always so honest--”

The prim Joseph Brinton of the office was not yet all transformed into a soldier of the legion. The sick man, his moment of breakdown passing, listened to his father’s praise quite calmly, taking it quite as a matter of fact.

There was no little pride in the manner in which he assented:

“Well, yes, I suppose I always was honest, as you say.”

Nor did he offer any protest as Dad bustled about, bathing his cheeks and twitching his hot pillow into shape, and running to the door to gaze out into the stifling haze for a sign of Jimmie and the nurse.

But when Dad at length settled down beside the cot, patting Joseph’s hand, the two of them sat quiet there in the dusk of the little room.

And for the first time since Joseph had thought of his father as disgraced, there was peace and love hovering about them, glorifying the dingy cottage between the battle lines.

Loud hummed the great locusts outside, a drowsy, distant z-z-z, z-z-z, like the lazy croon of the death-bearing Minie balls which Dad (that inveterate old child, who would never stop his making believe!) half-unconsciously pretended they really were.

Sitting in the little cottage, stroking Joseph’s hands, suddenly he heard voices coming--the shy little laugh of Battle Jimmie and, running through Jimmie’s chatter like a silver thread, a voice which startled him--a familiar voice he could not place, but which seemed rich with a peculiar magic that attaches itself to the beloved.

Softly laying Joseph’s hands back on the cot, he tiptoed to the door and saw--Jimmie and Mrs. Sessions, his dream-lady of the lavender-scented attic!

And his greeting to her might have been the shy effusiveness of a boy lover of eighteen.

“Why--it isn’t you, is it? I told him to ask for you, but I didn’t dare to hope--And it’s really _you_!”

“Guess it is!” chuckled the old lady delicately. “I--somehow--”

She blushed and hesitated. Then she frowned--oh, such a portentous frown!--as she suddenly remembered that she was a nurse in the service of U. S. A., and said severely:

“Who’s the patient?”

“It’s--my--son,” faltered Dad.

“Oh, my _dear_! Has he--bullied you again as he used to?” she said, with the quick, familiar affection of two who have gone through the same trials together.

“No, ma’am; he’s never done that, I shouldn’t say. But somehow we do seem a little nearer together now.”

“Let me take a look at him.”

As she entered the cottage the dusty, mildewed air seemed to shiver with a crisp and delicate fragrance of lavender.

And as her nimble, slender fingers, with their one ring--a worn, thin band of chased gold--passed softly over Joseph’s brow, the room seemed to change from a battle hospital to a home of mother love.

“He’s doing fine,” she smiled. “Did _you_ put on those bandages?”

“Yessum!” mumbled Captain Dadd, again shy and anxiously wondering if he by chance had been so fortunate as to put them on properly.

“Needn’t be so frightened, child,” she laughed. “They’re very nice--very nice, indeed. All I’ll need to do will be to watch him and change them in an hour or two.”

Then she stopped, and blushed again, and fidgeted with the pillow. On the opposite side of the cot Dad fidgeted with his collar and looked embarrassed and wished he could think of something to say.

While the superior Private Joseph Brinton said nothing at all, Jimmie stared with wonder at the sudden silence that had come upon his beloved Dad and the dear lady of the rosy cheeks.

“Uh!” said Dad, who really believed that he was going to say something sound and valuable about the weather.

But, as it occurred to him that, on the whole, it was rather foolish to talk about the weather in a day of battles and sudden death, he didn’t get beyond the “Uh--” only, stopped and looked slightly foolish.

“Yes?” said Mrs. Sessions wistfully, glancing involuntarily at the door.

Dad peeped at the face of Joseph. He was wishing that he could take charge of things. But in the presence of his formidable son dared he say to Mrs. Sessions all the things he wanted to--things that had rung through his brain in lonely nights of marching and hot noons of battle?

It was Jimmie who solved their shyness.

“Say, gee, if you want to talk, why don’t you g’wan outdoors and _do_ it? I’ll look after father while you’re gone; and do it as well as you can, I guess.”

And Dad, not daring even to glance at Joseph for approval or scorn, offered his arm with slow and stately old-world deference to Mrs. Sessions, and they passed thus together quietly out of the door.

Down by the spring towered a great laurel, which shut off the waves of heat that were dancing their devil-dance across the hot fields. Under it was a weather-grayed wooden bench carved with initials and rude heart-symbols of lovers long since forgotten.

Dad led the little lady to the bench. And she sat there, panting with her recent exertions, but smiling up at him as he stood shyly fingering the hilt of the sword she had given him.

“So you’re a captain--a _captain_!” she said, looking proudly at his shoulder insignia, shiny and new on the worn blue coat that had served him for strenuous months.

“Yessum--and--I wanted to tell you, time and time, that I owe a lot of it to you. I don’t really care so very much whether I’m captain or general or high private, so long as I’m serving this country of ours; except that perhaps as an officer I’m able to use a certain amount of technical knowledge of military tactics which it has been my hobby to acquire. But whatever I have done has largely, I think, been done because you regarded me as a _man_--not just as an old man--and gave me this sword as a symbol of your belief.”

Suddenly the old lady pulled out of the tiny pocket of her nurse’s costume a frail lavender-scented handkerchief and wiped her eyes. Reaching up her hand, she squeezed the mighty gnarled hand of Dad.

That was her only answer.

They were silent for a moment. All about them swirled the heat, while the shrill of the locusts was like a wall of sound, pierced only by the very far-off clanking of artillery harnesses, and once or twice by the faint, creepy boom of a cannon.

And into that silence stole a feeling that they had known each other always. They did not have youth’s slow, diffident reticences. They had lived and learned that when one finds an understanding heart it must be linked to one’s own very quickly and surely.

“You have--I am glad it has helped you,” she said softly.

For answer he bent his head and reverently kissed her hand.

“And your son--you are a little closer together?” she asked.

“Yes. I am more glad than I could tell you, ma’am, to say that we are.”

“And I love your grandson. Dear boy, he told me that he would take care of me. And do you know, I didn’t feel a bit like laughing at the tiny fellow, because I felt as though it were _you_ speaking.”

“You knew him then, ma’am?”

“Yes. He spoke your name and--you mustn’t go and think that you’re the only one who has been influenced by things.

“There, now! Laws! Laws! These men folks! They will always be taking the high and sacred rights for themselves, while of course we poor women just sit home and keep the wood-box filled and pick lint and don’t have any high aspirations. Of course my mother back in Wilbr’am never wanted to do anything but cook father’s vittles. Oh, no!”

Her thin, charming little voice pretended to be very severe, but somehow Dad didn’t mind it. Indeed, he grinned a lively, happy, young little grin as he sat down beside her while she ran on.

“Well, if you must know, you had just as much influence over me as I had over you. I got thinking that it was a shame and a disgrace that I should be there at home just sitting and holding my hands that the good Lord gave me to do something with, when you were out fighting for your country. So I up and enlisted as a nurse.

“I did! Land o’ Goshen, if I hadn’t I guess it’d ’a’ pretty near driven me into high strikes to sit there day after day while you were riding off, land knows where, being shot and never, never changing your shoes and socks, no matter how wet they got!”

Dad’s hand had slipped along the worn old seat of many lovers toward hers, where it lay pink and soft and everlastingly capable against the weather-gray pine.

“So,” she went on, “I just went out and enlisted as a nurse. But what _do_ you think? That snippet of a little lieutenant--and he’s just a doctor, and no more of a lieutenant than I am--he that was in charge of the nurses--he wa’n’t going to let me come when you called for me, and I just up and went. Captain, can’t you speak to him, you being his superior officer and all, and tell him he mustn’t be so high and mighty to women old enough to be his mother?”

She seemed to take him for the commander of all men--the man who had arranged everything and made everything just and good.

It was balm to Dad. Yet he said: “I’m afraid you were very insubordinate, Mrs.--”

He hesitated a little. The words tripped over one another in his throat. Then he brought out, roundly and commandingly:

“Ma’am, it isn’t right we should go on mistering each other when we’ve been such good friends and all, and--my name’s James.”

“And mine,” said she softly, “is Emily.”

Silence again.

His hand had strayed over to hers, and suddenly hers curled into a little ball, and his brown, strong hand closed over it protectingly.

“Emily,” he half-whispered, “you didn’t quite forget me.”

“No,” she whispered back.

“And you don’t think I’m just a drunken old--”

“Oh, my dear--oh, no, _no_!” she half-sobbed. “You’re a good man. You have loved God, and now, in the day of need, He has not forgotten His servant.”

“Emily--”